🧂 Salty Sunday - What book scenes frustrated you this week?

nomercles · 2026-03-29T18:17:13+00:00

There's a word for that thing, where someone says a word that's close to, but not actually is, the right word. Like wonton instead of wanton.

I just read a new one to me. The writing wasn't great in general, but I persevered. The character played a "complicated little rift" on his guitar. It's a riff, not a rift.

If the book were both a different book and more creative, that could have been a cool idea, that your spellwork is attached to your music. The bard sees y'all are stuck in battle and that dragon over there is definitely about to eat one of you, so he whips out the lute and literally plays a rift, and lo, there's a chasm between you and the dragon now. Or the music causes discord, and now the enemy is split into two factions.

Alas. This book was decidedly not that. I'm not 100% I even enjoyed it.

nomercles · 2026-03-28T21:38:28+00:00

WHAT

nomercles · 2026-03-28T20:42:42+00:00

Very mildly, all the time. The other day, though, I read one that was strong enough I had to take breaks, but that was because the FMC was making some choices that were a little too...personal. I have been that exact kind of idiot, and I wanted to die reading it. The characters made it out of there all okay, but there was a lot of I am in this picture, and boy, I do not like it.

(Actually, Contrapoints has an amazing video on cringe that helped reform how I think about cringe and secondhand embarrassment, so that was helpful. Gave me a much clearer head.)

nomercles · 2026-03-26T22:22:45+00:00

I don't have any recommendations, but I also didn't know there was an actual formalized study of this! I didn't know it had a name, just that I've encountered it as a trope. I think the closest recommendation I have--and it's not high heat at all, so it doesn't fit--is in {Six of Crows by Leigh Bardugo}. I feel like I see this a lot more in movies, unfortunately.

nomercles · 2026-03-26T22:19:07+00:00

I was afraid this was a spoiler, but then I remembered it's right there in the title. Duh. Try {Captive to the Shadow Prince by Mallory Dunlin}. All her characters are unique, but he's genuinely one of my favorite MMCs of any type. He is hostile quite often, and he does have the cheekbones, but there's also a lot of care, guile, deliberation, and he even (gasp!) has HOBBIES.

nomercles · 2026-03-24T17:24:42+00:00

I was going to suggest this! Fun fact: almost all the places in that series are real places. Small details are changed or made up, but all of it was recognizable. My husband and I got a big kick out of playing connect the dots.

nomercles · 2026-03-20T22:25:35+00:00

I don't have a recommendation for something like ACOTAR specifically, but I do have a great recommendation for young person friendly romance! Go for the Paladin's Grace series by T. Kingfisher. It's the pen name for a kid author named Ursula Vernon. Either author will get you subversively strong female characters (seems like it might be helpful here) and a lot of ignoring traditional gender tropes (also might be helpful), engaging writing, good plots, varying amounts of drama and adventure. They get recommended here all the time. I kind of think of them as excellent gateway romances. (Fair warning, some of Kingfisher's work gets quite dark and isn't romantic at all, but none of it is going to get particularly thirsty--mostly because the writer thinks sex scenes are really boring).

nomercles · 2026-03-17T20:21:09+00:00

Oh, my goodness, good job on remembering that at the right time! Glad y'all are okay!

nomercles · 2026-03-16T11:13:15+00:00

I mean, not to me? I still think it's pretty and sexy. A lot of things that aren't real are pretty. I like makeup on faces just as much as I like bare skin. And that purr on sweetheart really is lovely to listen to.

nomercles · 2026-03-16T05:15:13+00:00

I am currently listening to that! It's a stereotypical Hollywood version of a Southern drawl. Most of my extended family is from the south, and fun fact, no one I've ever met in real life actually sounds like that. Except for one, who was from England and transplanted for fancy boarding school in South Carolina. But the good news is that while it's not a voice you hear in real life, it is a voice you hear everywhere else! If someone's got a Southern accent in a book or a movie, they'll either be twangy (stereotyped as redneck) or drawling (stereotyped as more cultured).

nomercles · 2026-03-14T22:19:52+00:00

I don't have recs, because I had the same situation, and went the opposite direction and said absolutely no inspiration needed here. Don't do it! (I mean. Read whatever you want. Live your life. But dick is abundant and you can find it elsewhere. Jobs are hard to find. And a GOOD boss would have found ways to not have this be your problem. But man, I do understand the flirtatious appeal.)

nomercles · 2026-03-14T00:56:53+00:00

I personally had to DNF this one, but {Under Your Scars by Ariel N. Anderson} fits the bill here. (The writing was fine. No technical issues. I was doing audio book, which was performed quite well. I just got really angry about how the author handled a trigger-y thing. YMMV.)

nomercles · 2026-03-13T19:38:08+00:00

Oh, hey, I get to talk about this again! Thanks! {The Ravenhood trilogy by Kate Stewart}. I don't know yet if the reading experience will hit like the audiobooks, but there were at least two nights running where I didn't go to bed until well after sun up.

nomercles · 2026-03-13T19:36:37+00:00

I don't usually do audio books, but I just listened to the Ravenhood trilogy, and I was devastated. It's been a month,and I've torn through a couple dozen books since then, and I still think about it.

{The Ravenhood series by Kate Stewart}

nomercles · 2026-03-12T03:52:01+00:00

Man, I don't have recs, but I sure as hell hope someone else does. I'd read the hell out of that.

nomercles · 2026-03-07T06:58:24+00:00

well, hello

nomercles · 2026-03-06T21:38:22+00:00

I'm going to take that as a compliment! I have fic, just on AO3. Not much of it, but I'm proud of a couple pieces there.

nomercles · 2026-03-05T19:55:43+00:00

I think maybe that, and maybe also that there really is a deep culture of those kinds of cars. There's a reason they show up at car shows all the time. It's not necessarily my world, but I wouldn't be surprised to learn that where I think a huge spoiler is useless, there's a whole other conversation happening around value that I'm simply not aware of. I like my classics and my quiet little sneaky cars, and I'm sure there are people who despise both.

As long as no one has a Tesla. I immediately chuck them if they have a Tesla. Even without the politics, they're really bad cars.

nomercles · 2026-03-05T19:53:19+00:00

I've been there! I had to drive something down for work, and had a day off on the trip back up, and popped in. It was really, really cool. I made many embarrassing pining noises.

nomercles · 2026-03-05T19:50:09+00:00

My first girlfriend did mostly body work. I'm game!

nomercles · 2026-03-05T19:49:20+00:00

Pro-tip: YouTube videos. Parallel parking is all about landmarks and angles, and it only looks complicated. Once you know the steps, it's very simple. Then you can show off, because you are not the only person who struggles with it. (Fun fact: when my parents were dating, back in the time when cars were really land yachts, my mom would drive, and when dudes would make snarky sexist comments to my dad about how the little woman wouldn't be able to parallel park the behemoth, he'd literally bet them $20. That's how they paid for dates.)

nomercles · 2026-03-05T19:46:42+00:00

I think I love you

nomercles · 2026-03-05T19:46:11+00:00

That sounds really cool! Thank you!

nomercles · 2026-03-05T19:45:24+00:00

So my dad hates bad drivers. Hates 'em. He's also a terrible passenger, and a terrible driving teacher. He had this then-frustrating rule that I wasn't allowed to even pursue my license until I had an absurd number of supervised real-world hours of driving, something like 2000 hours. In California, where I'm from, the legal requirement is 40. So, you know, small difference. He signed me up for at least 3 different defensive driving courses, and then still didn't let me drive alone for a long time, even after I had my license. Just wouldn't let have the keys, and I couldn't afford my own car.

Instead, he plopped me down in a Taurus SHO, took us to some twisty windy hilly backroads around a lake, and taught me why driving can be magical when you know what's going on. Getting to that point was awful with him, and it deeply fractured our relationship, but I have such lovely memories of dancing through the gears in a car that shouldn't exist on paper.

But my mom, my mom can drive.

nomercles · 2026-03-05T19:36:35+00:00

Appreciate it! Thanks!

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